I have created a powershell interface which essentially collects information and then sends that info to an external PS script via Start-Job. I have a timer that triggers recieve-job every second, and updates an output box with STDOUT from the job I created.
External PS Script:
This script has many functions (which utilize many cmdlets), and will be printing messages via Write-Verbose to a log. The issue is, sometimes in these functions I print messages and/or also return a value.
As we all know, anything that a function returns is placed into standard output. So anytime a function returns a value, that value is printed into the Output Rich Textbox control. I don't want that. Also, if I am using VERBOSE, the message is not being printed in the control (however, it is being printed to the console)
What I want: Print only messages to my rich text box AND my log file, with no function return values in the stream (unless they are apart of a message itself).
Note: I am re-writing this application from a VB.NET app, to a Powershell Studio app... and I noticed previously this was being done by streaming STD Output into the text box, using a similar external powershell script--except that script was using WRITE-HOST. That doesn't make sense to me, as write-host isn't even supposed to be put into the stream.
Alternative Approach:
I had a working example of letting the Job add to the log itself, and then having the UI run Get-Content -tail 1... This WOULD WORK, except that some of my messages will be printed on more than one line, and it wouldn't pull everything as expected. If anyone has a way for me to get any X number of new lines in the log at all times, let me know. That might be easier than my current approach.
so basically you want to use powershell backwards? functions should only return a value that you want in your actual output stream, anything that should not be returning a value to the stream should either be captured in a variable or sent to Out-Null, if want to provide information on what the command is doing that is what write-verbose is for. and Write-Verbose is working as intended, just like write-host it is not put into the stream.
To answer your question what you should do is rewrite your functions so that they return a single value(or no value at all if that is appropriate), for functions that cannot be rewritten you can suppress their output in your script by either assigning them to a variable(if they must be used later) or simply piping them to Out-Null. anything that is currently being captured in the verbose stream that needs to be a part of your output should also be moved to the standard stream and written with Write-Output, potentially with `If statements wrapped around them if you only want that data on certain runs, however if you really want to combine the verbose stream with the standard stream you can check out the info here - Redirect two or more Powershell streams other than output stream to the same file